They have a disarmingly over-chummy demeanour, wear clothes they're the wrong side of 40 for and prefer to talk about saving the rainforest rather than profit and loss.

Some appear so health-obsessed you can imagine them having kale juice fed intravenously.

What a hoot if next season the show's producers could find a cameo for Dara Khosrowshahi.

Uber's charismatic chief ('Cause-Row-Sha-Hee', since you ask) is an investment banker gone rogue.

Once a suited-and-booted Wall Street dealmaker, he's now happily imbibing the Palo Alto Kool Aid, sporting three-day stubble and dressing like he's just stepped out of a J Crew catalogue.

Khosrowshahi might be head of the world's most famous cab firm, but when he speaks you'd be forgiven for thinking he's working on a cure for polio.

He arrived at Uber last year with a big reputation and even bigger salary from Expedia, which he turned from a fledgling online booking site into the world's biggest travel agent.

So keen was he was to join that he chose to forgo half of a $95m share incentive supposed to have tied him to Expedia until 2020.

Why he forsook $45m to join Uber was anyone's guess. Hampered by accusations of gender discrimination and intellectual-property theft, the firm had also become a byword for public relations cock-ups, many of them caused by Khosrowshahi's predecessor, Travis Kalanick, who, inter alia, was recorded verbally abusing one of his drivers. He later apologised.

As chalices go, Khosrowshahi looks to have picked up a poisoned one. But observers say the Iranian-born father of four has enough swagger to drink it, spit in it, pass it back and ask for seconds.

RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

Share

He certainly knows a thing a two about adversity. After growing up under the Shah in Iran, where his family ran a pharmaceuticals company, the Khosrowshahis were forced to flee during the revolution, when Dara was just nine.

Four years after escaping to New York, Khosrowshahi's dad returned to care for his ailing father and couldn't leave again for six years, leaving Dara's mother to bring up him and his brother alone.

With most of their assets seized by the ayatollahs, what little money the Khosrowshahis took with them they spent on the children's education. It proved a worthy investment.

His brother Kaveh also enjoys a decent career at investment bank Allen & Co. Not bad for two boys growing up amid students chanting: 'Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.'

It was at Allen & Co where Khosrowshahi started his career, joining after an engineering degree at Brown University in 1991. He caught the eye of one of the bank's biggest clients, media mogul Barry Diller, back then one of the industry's foremost rainmakers, who persuaded him over to his firm IAC.

In 2001 they crafted a $1.3 billion deal to buy Expedia from Microsoft. Their timing couldn't have been worse.

Just days after the deal closed, 9/11 happened, effectively shutting down the travel industry overnight. Sod it, said Diller, people are always gonna want to take holidays.

After Khosrowshahi was made chief executive in 2005, he embarked on an outward expansion strategy, snapping up brands such as Trivago and Hotels.com. Within ten years, revenues quadrupled to $8.7 billion. Diller, in turn, made Khosrowshahi America's highest-paid chief executive. Diller tried his best to keep him, but when the Uber job came up, Khosrowshahi couldn't resist the chance to improve a stuttering company.

He's spent the past year apologising – a lot. Mainly in London, where mayor Sadiq Khan revoked Uber's licence a month after Khosrowshahi's arrival amid allegations drivers were treated appallingly. Stories were legion of long hours, poor pay and few employment rights. There have been safety concerns too. Sexual assaults reported to Uber were not passed on to the police promptly.

Khan has placed Uber on probation for another year. Then he'll decide whether Khosrowshahi means what he says about improving Uber's culture. Or whether, like his passengers, we're all just being taken for a ride.